Friday, August 12, 2016

Goddess Fish Promotions Book Tour: Clementina

Leathan
Wilkey has been hired to babysit Clementina, a seventeen-year-old
whose rich daddy is going through a messy divorce and is
over-compensating.

Leathan soon tires of her spending habits,
her selfie obsession, and her social media preoccupation as his ward
drags him from shop to boutique to jeweler, approaching each with the
self-possession that comes from a lifetime of getting her own way and
never once having to worry about money.

But when Clementina
snaps her fingers and her boyfriend doesn’t come running, something
is up. He doesn’t appear because he’s been murdered.

When
Leathan investigates, he finds that the boyfriend has no background
and met Clementina through a connection made by daddy’s business
partner.

Daddy’s business partner who has been slowly and
progressively putting daddy in a vice, grabbing more of the business,
and who is now menacing Clementina directly to manipulate daddy.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Excerpt:

Johnson
McElroy and Orville Michael Mallet seemed pleased to have fixed a
problem. A problem where I was having trouble understanding what
really made it a problem.

The two
men—one groomed to look like a logical and rational arguing
machine; the other determined to display his individual creativity,
which looked exactly the same as everyone else’s individual
creativity—shook my hand at the door.

“You
know the way out,” I said, as if I had a clue. I only knew how to
enter and leave if I was driven by Reece.

The two
headed for the elevator and I made my way through the cavernous
entrance hall back to the open living space and the kitchen area. The
kitchen area, which had more floor space than most apartments I had
lived in.

“I
should have a word with Clementina,” I said to Angeline Bautista,
the housekeeper who had remained invisible while the two company men
had been present.

“She’s
gone out,” said the housekeeper.

“When?”

“While
you talked.”

“Where?”

She
shrugged.

“What
did Reece say?”

She
looked confused.

“Reece—the
driver. What did he say?”

The
confusion remained. “Nothing.”

“But
he must have said something when he came up.”

“He
didn’t come up,” she said.

“She
went to him?” I could feel the hesitation in my speech as my brain
tried to catch up with the situation and make sure my language was
unambiguous for the non-native English speaker.

“No.
She went out on her own,” said Angeline.

“When?”

“While
you talked,” she said with greater emphasis.

“How
long ago?”

She
tilted her head from side to side. “Ten minutes?” she said. More
a question than a statement.

I pulled
out my phone and called Reece. “Does Clementina go out on her own?”

“Nope,”
said Reece. “Daddy says no.”

“Well,
she has.”

Reece
swore under his breath. “I’ll be up.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~

AUTHOR
Bio and Links:

Simon
Cann is the author of the Boniface, Montbretia Armstrong, and Leathan
Wilkey series of books.

In
addition to his fiction, Simon has written a range of music-related
and business-related books, and has also worked as a ghostwriter.

Before
turning full-time to writing, Simon spent nearly two decades as a
management consultant, where his clients included aeronautical,
pharmaceutical, defense, financial services, chemical, entertainment,
and broadcasting companies.

What group did you hang out with in high school?

What are you passionate about these days?

Family, friends, and writing good
books.

If you had to do your journey to getting
published all over again, what would you do differently?

I fell sideways into being published—a
colleague at work asked me to do him a favor and take over
co-authoring a book from him. Dumb luck got me published. The second
time I was published I sent a proposal to a few publishers and
several asked me to go with them. Again, I was lucky. I got lucky,
and for me it was comparatively easy to get published—for most
authors this was not the case.

However, since I was first published,
there have been big changes to the publishing world—it’s now much
easier for an author to get published (easier because there are
options that include self-publishing and technology has moved forward
with ebooks and print-on-demand). The ease with which one can get a
book out there has revealed a bigger difficulty—but a difficulty
which has always been there: finding and connecting with a
readership.

If I were to do anything differently,
it would be to focus on building my readers group.

By the way, did I mention that if you
join my readers group then I’ll send you some free books? 
Just head over to my website (simoncann.com) and tell me where to
send the books.

Ebook or print? And why?

For me—ebooks, because my house is
full of paper books and my eyes aren’t what they were so I like
being able to increase the size of type. I also love being able to
carry around hundreds of titles in a device that’s smaller and
lighter than a paperback.

For readers—whatever they want.

What is your favorite scene in this book?

There’s a scene about one-third of
the way into the book where Clementina drags Leathan Wilkey to a
boutique to buy some clothes.

Leathan has been charged with
babysitting the willful seventeen-year-old Clementina. Clementina’s
boyfriend has disappeared and Leathan has seen an opportunity to keep
her occupied for a few hours. She thinks they’re looking for the
wayward boyfriend—he knows that he’s distracting her from causing
him problems.

The two track down the boyfriend to his
hotel but he’s not there. Leathan wants to get into the boyfriend’s
hotel room and realizes Clementina would be able to walk in.
Clementina agrees but—as only a willful seventeen-year-old can—says
she needs a new outfit as a disguise so that the lie she’ll need to
tell in order to get in will be backed by the clothes she’s
wearing. Leathan figures that two people asking for the boyfriend at
his hotel within a few minutes would be suspicious and a brief detour
for some shopping is just another way to keep his charge distracted,
so he doesn’t argue.

And so Leathan and Clementina find
themselves in a Paris boutique with a shop assistant running around
trying to satisfy the teenager’s every whim.

The reason this scene is a favorite
with me is that this is where the nature of the relationship between
Leathan and Clementina changes. Before the scene, Clementina is a
teenager resenting the handler her daddy has imposed upon her and
Leathan is a thirty-something with a tiresome charge.

Somewhere in the scene—somewhere in a
boutique in Paris as Clementina asks for Leathan’s opinion about
the clothes she’s trying on—something changes and there’s a
subtle shift, a recognition, an understanding, a new respect. Two
individuals enter the boutique—a unified team with shared goal
leaves.